The Ploughmen: A Novel Read online

  She had refilled her glass after dinner and brought it with her, in her unstable state bearing it before her two-handed like a ciborium. When she drank the last of it and set the glass down her hand trembled. “Oh, my,” she said. Gload had been watching and laid his hand over hers as though warming a young bird fallen from its nest.

  “Why don’t you go lay down for a while,” he said. “I’ll take care of that little bit of dishes.”

  “You wouldn’t mind?”

  “Go on. You look wore out.”

  “You’re not supposed to say that to a lady.”

  He looked into her eyes and they were laced with red, her face with its faded makeup was ashen and the lines beneath her eyes and at the corners of her mouth seemed drawn with ink. “You look tired is all. How’s that?”

  “Oh, it doesn’t matter.”

  He stood at the sink when he’d finished, watching a spring storm form up in the east, newly arrived birds roiling up before the verdigris clouds like autumn leaves. The water ran from the tap and after a long while he noticed it and screwed down the handles and stood once again looking out.

  * * *

  He came from the closet holding it, saying to her in a whisper, “I always liked this on you.” The thin beige draperies rose and riffled on the breeze and the sky framed in the window sash was streaked with distant rain. The room had taken on an odd green cast. He sat in a chair by the bed for some time, watching her sleep and he held across his arms like an offering the green dress he had bought for her one year on a trip to Billings. Storm clouds drug their tentacles across the sageland ten miles to the east but he could smell the rain on the air. As if it grew in a window box he could smell the sage. Then he stood, still watching her, with the bed’s other pillow in his hands.

  Her movements under him he thought were not unlike those of their lovemaking, her squirming and bucking and even when she stopped and he pulled the pillow away her face was dreamy, her eyes half-closed as if on the verge of mere gratified sleep or rapture.

  Gload removed her clothes and laid them aside—they smelled of the bar, perhaps of other men—and he buttoned on the green dress that had been his favorite, his huge brutal hands fumbling at the buttons and impossible hooks and at an antique collar pin she had treasured. “This makes your eyes look greener,” he said, but he spoke of an image of memory only, as in fact the light was gone from them and what he could see beneath the half-closed papery lids seemed leached of color.

  From the bureau he selected one of her handkerchiefs, its edges trimmed in lace. He held it to his nose, folded it neatly, and put it in a rear pocket. He slid his hands beneath her, at neck and knees, and took her up. She weighed nothing. At the hole he bent and laid her in the grass gently as if to prevent waking her and went around to the opposite side and slid down into the cool of the earth. He lifted her once again and laid her down, arranging the folds of the dress around her legs modestly, and he crossed her arms on her chest, thought better of it and laid them beside her in the hole. Raindrops now, like falling coins, rattled through the sage south of the orchard. He touched her cheek, her hair newly red, laid the handkerchief over her face and climbed with difficulty out of the hole for the third time. With the spade he had left there leaned against a tree for that purpose he covered her over, not looking down but working at the two piles with an easy rhythm and listening to his own breathing, to the call of birds among the trees and the rain in earnest then hissing in the branches.

  That night he lay on the selfsame bed and called on his dream of plowing, furrowing the ground over and over as the landscape reeled past and kits took his scent and the gulls came. Sleep, though, would not come and so he lay smoking in the dark. He strained to hear above the wind the pong of suspended harrow tines. Rain lashed the windowpanes and muddied the grassless square plot in the apple trees and John Gload imagined a voracious reticulum of roots beneath the orchard plot stirring, then writhing like a nest of snakes and finally, in the damp dark, winning purchase once again in earth, in bones.

  The day following was warm and windy and he spent it putting the house in good order. He hosed off his digging tools and hung them in the shed. He aligned her shoes at the bottom of the closet and he washed and hung her clothes. Several times he went down the lane and from various points stood looking into the grove of greening fruit trees, the weave of their wild, untended branches astir with birds. He waited each time to hear the clash of his rustic windchime and then he went slewing back up the road.

  He was standing so in the lane two days later with his hands in his rear pockets when he saw the dust of the approaching patrol cars and he went again unhurriedly to his garden chair to wait. Since the brief rains the twisted copse was furred with inchoate green, at his feet the crocuses and breaching tulips, nodding trumpets of the daffodils, yellow beyond yellow in the sun.

  FIFTEEN

  In later years, and at unexpected times, the thought came to him that it had been a ridiculous place for his life to come apart and it took little more than a linoleum pattern beneath his feet or the jangle of dropped silverware to dizzy him and make his mouth go dry.

  He’d gone to the hospital shortly before noontime. In the ICU waiting room he sat across from an elderly woman who held in one sclerous hand a rosary of bloodred beads, covering her eyes with the other as though unable to bear the sight of the world beyond her memories. He’d fallen asleep in the plastic chair with his head lolling and his mouth ajar and he had nearly missed her as she swept through with one arm stuck in the sleeve of an overcoat as though she were going out somewhere. He’d not seen her in two weeks and his heart throbbed at the sight of her. She had grown thinner and her hair was cut in some new way. He asked her to lunch and she stood frozen looking at him with her arm in the coat and then looking for a long moment beyond him and she seemed to be making some kind of decision. She said she did not have much time but that they could eat in the cafeteria. They rode the elevator in silence, Val staring foolishly at her white shoes, at her perfect calves in their nurse’s hose, white as bandages.

  He had taken a tray and absently pointed at a stack of grilled cheese sandwiches. She would not eat anything and she chose a table in the center of the crowded cafeteria.

  He set the tray down and when they sat he said, “How are things going?”

  “They’re going fine.”

  He pointed to the coat she had draped over the corner of the table. “Were you going out somewhere for lunch?”

  “Not really.”

  “Not really? You were or you weren’t.”

  “You don’t need to talk to me like that, Val. I’m not one of your perps.”

  “That’s not a word anybody says. That’s a TV word.”

  “Well, Val, my point is I’m not an investigation.”

  “No, it’s just that you were going somewhere because you had your coat so you were going out. I don’t have to be a cop to figure that.”

  Her hands were in her lap hidden from him by the table and she stared into them.

  “I am so tired of it, Val.”

  He looked at her. “If you could tell me what ‘it’ is, I would appreciate it.”

  “It,” she said. At the serving line a metal tray was dropped and it clattered on the floor, the silverware skittering. “Struggling. Tired of struggling.”

  He studied her across the table. Her hair was a kind of short boy cut and there were streaks of lighter blond in it. In the hollow of her lovely slender neck rested a tiny silver dolphin on a strand of chain, a charm he had not given her and had never seen before and at the sight of it the blood drained from everywhere and seemed to pool cold in the bottom of his stomach. Her words after that fell on his head like blows, forcing his eyes to the floor where he beheld the linoleum’s pattern swimming and blurred.

  “We seem to struggle at everything,” she said. “To find the energy to talk. To find time to be who we really are.”

  “Riddles. These are just crazy riddles, goddamn it,
Glenda.” He swung his eyes up to her face briefly. “I know who I am. But I look at you now and I think maybe you’re finding out you’re somebody else. That you’re making yourself into somebody else.”

  “That’s just it exactly, Val. You’ve always known who you were. But I was just a part of you. And I’m seeing that being part of you isn’t enough. It’s not fair to me.”

  He was close to weeping in frustration. “I never said anything ever, did I? Jesus. Fair? It wasn’t like I ever said don’t change anything. I wouldn’t have cared about your hair.”

  “Christ, Val, it isn’t about my hair.”

  With his head bowed he looked to be a man at prayer. His clasped hands as he sought to maintain some grasp on the world were white and the veins in his forearms stood out. But the world became in an instant nothing more than a sphere encompassing the two of them, a metal tray, a tabletop—all else beyond an indiscernible realm without meaning.

  “No, not your hair,” he said. “Not about your hair at all but about somebody else, about some other motherfucker.” He stopped and breathed deeply. He stared at the floor. “It’s a doctor, am I correct? And maybe he’s the bwana with all the dead heads in his house and the fucking tasseled shoes. Is he here right now? I’ll bet the fucker’s here right now.” He made a show of looking around the room, though he could have seen nothing at that moment beyond the end of his arm. “It’s like a bad movie, like a movie you’ve seen a hundred times.”

  “I didn’t say it was anyone.” Her voice came at him flat and cold.

  “But it is.”

  There seemed not the slightest bit of shame in her. She looked straight ahead at nothing. She took a breath. “I have been seeing someone.”

  He forced himself to raise his head and he wore a look of incredulity. “You’re married to me. You can’t be seeing someone.”

  “Nevertheless.”

  The security guard rose with some effort from behind a table where he’d been reading a newspaper. His shirt hung from his distended paunch and as he walked toward them he tucked the tails into the tops of his trousers. He stood beside the table with his hands crossed and resting atop his stomach. Indistinct tattoos on the back of one wrist and above each knuckle. He stood for some time looking from Millimaki to his wife and listening. Finally Millimaki looked up. The man was in his sixties and wore a utility belt hung with keys and a flashlight and a canister of mace.

  “We’re having a private conversation.”

  “Not all that private, Deputy, it turns out, because I could hear it over yonder.”

  “This is private.”

  “Maybe this ain’t the place for this sort of business.”

  Millimaki ignored him. Glenda said, “We’re just leaving.”

  “We’re not just leaving.”

  “Deputy,” the man said. “Conductation of this business to be done elsewhere.”

  Through the sudden diminishment of the world the man had become a vague and watery shape uttering words from far away. Millimaki glanced briefly to his left. “Fuck off. That’s not even a word.”

  “Val, stop it.”

  “Fuck your conductation.” He brought his hands up to the tabletop, his fists clenched. His ears rang strangely, as if he’d been clubbed.

  “And it’s a doctor,” he said. “Couldn’t it have been at least a fucking janitor?”

  “It doesn’t matter who it is.”

  “And he gave you that chain, is that not correct? That fish.” He’d meant to point but as if they did not belong to him his hands rose toward her pale neck in a clutching gesture.

  Her hand went reflexively to her throat. “Please please stop.”

  “A fucking doctor,” he repeated. “All this mystery about doctors, all this, whatever, glorification.” His voice was rising. People at the nearby tables had begun to stare. “All the fucking mystery. Cutting and sawing and rooting around. Christ, they’re high-priced carpenters. They’re nothing.”

  The guard said, “Deputy, I’m asking please.”

  Glenda buried her face in her hands, not crying, not ashamed, Val noted, but merely embarrassed.

  Through her fingers she said wearily, “Oh, Val.”

  “I would cut every goddamn one of them from crotch to eyeball, I swear to Christ.”

  She took down her hands. Her perfect face was hard and smooth as topaz. In a harsh whisper she said, “My God, Val. You’re scaring people. You’re wearing a gun. That scares people.”

  He leaned closer to her, the silver neck charm inches from his face. “Okay,” he whispered. “Exactly. And how about if I take this gun and shove it up your doctor’s ass? I could do that. I could do that just for a smile.”

  “That’s enough, Val. This is a public place.”

  The security guard had been staring at Glenda’s throat or perhaps trying to see down the front of her uniform. His left hand hovered near the mace canister at his belt. “Like the young lady says, pardner,” he said. “Not here, not at this time.”

  “Yes,” Millimaki said. “A public place. And it just now occurred to me why you decided to tell me all this here, because of your misguided idea that I would not do anything to embarrass you and this is the part where you’re oh so very fucking wrong.” He wiped a sleeve across his eyes and stood up. From the foggy periphery of his vision he noted the shape of the guard moving toward him. “Ladies and gentlemen, I am a Copper County sheriff’s deputy officer can I have your attention I am a law enforcement officer and my wife has just informed me she is seeing someone and please remain calm. I assure all present that should he be here I will not at this time discharge my firearm into the anal region of the medical professional who is fucking my wife.”

  * * *

  Two days later he sat lacing his boots on a long varnished bench in the locker room at the end of his shift, through the diamond mesh of the high windows a luminous light the color of wheat. He did not look up at the sound of boot heels coming down the row of lockers.

  John Gload that night had been more reticent than usual and sat smoking quietly in his cell in the dark. The night wore on. Even the craziest of the men in their cages were subdued, as though the old man had cast a spell on them that he might have peace for his night’s plowing and eventual sleep. Millimaki had himself barely slept since his seizure of grief and rage at the hospital and his shift beneath the tube lights had seemed without end.

  Now Voyle Dobek stood over him. “I seen you in the park talking to Gload,” he said. Against the bright backdrop of the morning’s light, when Millimaki looked up, Dobek’s figure was in shadow, his breath that close a nauseating admixture of coffee and Skoal. Millimaki’s stomach lurched. The act of lacing his boots in his state of exhaustion seemed impossible work. He stared stupidly at hands suddenly as inept as a toddler’s. Beside his scuffed boot toes Dobek’s spit-shined Wellingtons were dazzling.

  “How can you sit and talk to a piece of shit like that?” Dobek said.

  “Which exactly piece of shit would we be talking about, Voyle? I thought they were all pieces of shit to you.”

  “Your old psycho.” He effected a nasal sound of disgust. “The way you sit out there.”

  “You pretty much nailed it, Voyle. Two guys, a bench, the exchange of words. That’s how it’s done.”

  “No, that ain’t the way you do it, asshole. Not out there.”

  “Out where?”

  “Out in the public. Where the civilians can see you.”

  “Haven’t noticed anybody watching.”

  “You’d be surprised. The fuckers see everything.”

  “I don’t know what there is to see, Voyle. Two guys sitting on a bench.”

  “There’s a right fucking way and a wrong fucking way is what I’m telling you and you don’t sit out there with a psycho piece of shit for the citizens to see. If you don’t give a shit.” He waved a hand vaguely about the vacant room. “It looks bad on us.”

  “I’m very sorry, Officer Dobek,” Millimaki said. “To
make you look bad would just about ruin my whole entire day.”

  “I had you pegged as a smart-ass from the minute you come on. I was willing to give you the benefit of the doubt. But then I don’t know.” He straightened his back, looked around the room as if to address an audience. “Heard about your little performance up at the hospital. I guess if my wife was fucking some doctor, it might make me out to be a smart-ass too.”

  Because he was sitting down and had to come up off the bench as he swung, the uppercut caught Dobek squarely in the groin and Millimaki felt the soft give of the man’s balls. His fist seemed to disappear and he had just enough time to pull back before the big man fell, clattering to the floor like a bagful of loose change as his billy, keys, cuffs and gun butt hit the tile. When from the other side of the lockers men came running, Val was astride the man’s back with his nightstick under Dobek’s chin and may well have choked him to death as he remembered nothing. He had heard the word “wife” come from Dobek’s mouth, later remembered just that, as if like a cartoon voice balloon it hung in the air, or like a plume of winter breath, and after that there was nothing—a void washed in red.

  As if drunk he arrived home with no memory either of the drive and he sat in his recliner staring out at the scarcely moving portraiture of the brilliant day—clouds, quavering branches heavy with leaf, a nervous sparrow on the windowsill. He became aware of a terrible odor and got up and walked about the room and sniffed at the dog, asleep on his bed. “You didn’t puke somewhere, Tom, did you, bud?” He walked into the empty bedroom and found the smell there too and realized it was him, on him. He shucked his pants and saw the stain on his knees then, vomit he must have knelt in while riding Voyle Dobek like some giant tortoise in a crimson sea of oblivion.

  * * *

  Even as Millimaki closed the office door, the sheriff said, “I don’t know what it is but we’ve got to get at this problem and solve it right fucking now.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “My ass, ‘Yes, sir.’ Spit it out, Val. I cannot have my officers killing each other in the locker room.”